| > The reason I don’t agree is SEO is effective where it has moved into the areas of analytics, PR and content marketing, not in its distinct practices (backlink building and on-page optimizations.) I would say that backlinks are still a hugely important part of "SEO" (with or without the scare quotes). Companies run things called "Private Blog Networks" so that properties under their control can backlink to each other and get the PageRank bumped. Discerning PBN's place on the spectrum between Public Relations and just outright "link buying" basically depends on how charitable you're feeling that day. This is the shtick of every big SEO business: "Of course SEO doesn't work, so we don't do SEO! We optimize your position in search engines through good old-fashioned $UNTAINTED_TASK_NAMES!" The point is that it's activity explicitly targeted at gaming search results, and thus, "Search Engine Optimization". The only way to make it more difficult for dishonest people to make a buck on this would be for Google to get a lot more explicit about how it formulates its rankings, which, for obvious reasons, they don't. As long as there's no objective measurement or standard, there will be no real way to be sure that the techniques employed by a specific vendor 1) work at all; and 2) are ethically satisfactory. Someone with a backdoor at Google, after all, could make a pretty penny. It'd be naive to pretend like such things are never attempted at an org the size of Google. People will take advantage of every hack they can to get Google to rank them more highly; as long as that's true, not only will the SEO marketplace thrive, but people will be identifying and exploiting those hacks. |